


corporate patricide

by leoandsnake



Series: frat bros [3]
Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Sex, M/M, Mentions of Suicide Ideation, Oral Sex, gay stewy and his gay girlfriend, kendall faced with press conference fallout, longtime best friends shit, minor finance world/plot stuff, post-2x10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:22:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29765097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandsnake/pseuds/leoandsnake
Summary: “To be clear,” Kendall says, coughing, “I don’t want to see or talk to Sandy tonight. I’m not, um, in the right mindset. This is good, though, for you… for you guys. No matter what happens with me, this is good for you, so, just, uh, keep that at the fore.”Stewy stares at him, then demands, “Why are you talking to me like you’re about to blow your brains out?”
Relationships: Stewy Hosseini/Kendall Roy
Series: frat bros [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1566478
Comments: 6
Kudos: 37





	corporate patricide

**Author's Note:**

> sorry i forgot to update this series for two years. traffic was crazy

Kendall doesn’t start shaking until he steps back out into the hallway. His hands are steady the whole time he’s addressing the press, steady when he rips up his notes, steady when he gives Greg the thumbs up to distribute his documents (and Greg leaps into action, passing out copies to reporters like they’re handmade invitations to his band’s house show).

But the second the door to the briefing room shuts behind him, he’s swallowed in adrenaline that tunnels his vision, makes his hands shake and his teeth chatter. It’s like coming down off the worst drug known to man. He fights his way through stunned interlocutors, who are exclaiming “Kendall!” like it’s a synonym for “Help!” or “Oh my God!” or “Fire!” “ _Kendall._ _Kendall!”_

Jess’s face floats into his vision. He grabs her upper arm, and she grabs his, like some crazy Spartan handshake.

“Jess,” Kendall says, “can you please find me a private room, and can you please get Stewy on the phone?”

All of the blood has drained from Jess’s face, but she nods like nothing is wrong. “Just give me one second,” she says.

/

‘One second’ ends up being more like fifteen minutes. Jess manages to find him a small lounge that no one is in, and his bodyman posts up at the door, at which point they all realize that they are now in enemy territory. The members of Kendall’s security who were not on Kendall’s personal payroll have abandoned him and joined forces with the Roy-payrolled building security to start trying to kick out Kendall and all Kendall-allied persons.

In the hallway outside the lounge, Kendall can hear absurd arguments taking place. Someone threatens to call the police, to which Jess responds, “On charges of what?”

“Trespassing,” a male voice says.

 _“Trespassing?_ He’s a COO of the company that owns this building.”

“He just quit on live TV!”

“No, he didn’t, he never actually said that he quit. And he hasn’t been fired, either.”

Another voice says, “Someone get ahold of Logan. Has anyone gotten ahold of Logan yet? Anyone?”

This goes on and on. Finally, Jess comes in and hands Kendall one of his cell phones. Kendall half-rises off of the couch he’s sitting on to take it from her.

“Sorry,” Jess says. “It took me a while to get through to him, it’s a little chaotic out there.”

“It’s okay,” Kendall says. “Thank you.”

She nods and heads back out onto the battlefield. Kendall raises the phone to his ear.

“What the fuck?” says Stewy’s voice.

“Stewy —”

“No no no,” Stewy interrupts. “I’m talking now, shut up. _What the fuck?”_

Kendall smiles without meaning to. “So you saw, I’m guessing?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t see anything,” Stewy says. “I’m just sitting here staring at the wall. I’m definitely not watching the CNBC postgame analysis of you murdering your dad on live TV and waving his head around.”

“Listen —”

“ _What is going on_?”

“Are you in New York?” Kendall says, checking the time on his Blancpain. “Are you at your apartment?”

Stewy is quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he says, “I am in New York, at my apartment.”

“Okay, good. Can I come over?”

“Can you come over,” Stewy repeats, sounding incredulous.

“Yeah. I need to talk to you, and I can’t go back to my place right now, I can’t go anywhere people will think I’m gonna be.”

“Ken.”

“What?”

“You can’t do this, dude. You can’t pull this shit, and, and —”

“I’m playing my friend card,” Kendall interrupts him, making his voice firm. His hands are shaking more now than they were before. “You gave me a friend card, and I’m playing it now, and you can’t say no to it.”

“Oh, is that it, huh?” Stewy says. “No takesies-backsies, are those the rules we’re going by?”

“Fuck you, man. I basically just handed you a forty billion dollar company on a silver platter, I handed you the shareholders, and if you want to get all hysterical because you’re the dog that caught the car, you can do that on your own time, but I think you owe me a little —”

“Ken?” Stewy interrupts.

Kendall falls quiet.

“I was just fucking with you,” Stewy says. “I accept the friend card.”

Kendall’s breath catches. He stares down at his feet where they rest on the gray carpet, stroking the smooth metal back of his iPhone with his thumb. “So I can come over?”

“If you can make it uptown without dragging the entire Wall Street press corps with you, yeah, you can come over.”

“Okay. Let me work up a strategy on that. I’ll see you soon.”

Stewy laughs. “Whatever,” he says, but his voice is light with relief.

/

Once Kendall puts his voyage to Stewy’s UWS apartment in motion, Jess works very fast to get him there, dragging Kendall himself around like a catatonic mannequin while running interference with the press, security, and dozens of furious Waystar C-suite satellite people in suits.

They know they’ll be followed out of the parking garage by press and paparazzi, so Kendall is shoved into a decoy sedan while one of his security guys who somewhat resembles him gets into the backseat of the Range Rover he arrived in.

The sedan hurtles to a halt outside Stewy’s apartment building, double-parking, and Jess says to Kendall and his bodyman, “You guys go, we’ll keep driving just in case.”

“Jess,” Kendall says to her, “no matter what happens with all this — I got you, alright?”

She nods as if this wasn’t even in question. “You have to go,” she says.

Kendall nods back, then staggers out of the car into the hot, fragrant New York air, his bodyman Steve on his heels. The sedan screeches away, leaving them. Steve starts hustling Kendall toward the entrance.

The higher the elevator climbs, the more Kendall starts getting nervous about seeing Stewy again, much like he did in Greece. He checks his reflection in the shimmering silver walls of the elevator, then makes a face at himself about how pathetic that is.

Stewy’s elevator opens directly into his apartment, which is not ideal. Kendall doesn’t even get a chance to steel himself before knocking; just boom, the doors open and he’s there, immediately in Stewy’s living space. He’s been here a hundred times before, but never as the surrendering army — Germany at the Treaty of Versailles.

Kendall steps out of the elevator. Behind him, he hears a soft mechanical _boop_ as Steve presses the lobby button, and then the elevator doors shut again.

Stewy comes around the corner. He’s dressed weekend-casual, yacht-chill like he was in Greece, but there’s something self-consciously neat about his appearance, like he freshened up after Kendall called him.

Kendall considers that maybe this is just an egotistical fantasy, but then he catches a whiff of freshly applied cologne wafting from Stewy’s skin and notices how tense his body language is.

“Hey,” Kendall says to him.

“Hey,” Stewy says.

They stare at each other.

“You are on some other shit,” Stewy says, shaking his head. “Truly.”

“I’ve missed you, man,” Kendall says in perfect honesty.

“Fuck you. Come sit down.”

Kendall follows Stewy into his living room, where floor-to-ceiling windows surround an immense, plushy square gray couch that forms almost a complete square around a massive wood table. He takes a seat on the couch, but Stewy does not. Stewy stays standing and starts to pace, remaining in constant motion like a shark.

“I thought I started having a stroke while I was watching your press conference,” Stewy says. “I lifted my arms over my head to check, even. I was just sitting on my couch with my arms over my head like I was on a fucking roller coaster.”

Kendall imagines this. It’s funny to think about.

“Why are you here?” Stewy says, still pacing. “Why did you call me?”

“I didn’t know who else to call,” Kendall says.

“Yeah? Because I wouldn’t be _my_ first call, in this situation.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have called you?”

“No, of course not, I’m just wondering if I can trust you. But, like — of course I can trust you, you just suicide bombed your dad, what ulterior motive could you possibly have, what could you possibly do to me?”

“Nothing,” Kendall says.

Stewy stares at him, seemingly unconvinced.

“What I’m getting from this,” Kendall says, “is you probably already told Sandy I called you?”

“Of course I told Sandy you called me,” Stewy says. “In fact, I think it’s in your personal best interest for me to tell Sandy that. I mean, we’re in fucking uncharted territory, here, and Sandy’s… old.”

“Old?”

“You know what I mean. Seasoned. Experienced. I feel like I’m back in seventh grade. Plus, you really fucked him. I wanted to get in and soften him up just in case you want back in on the deal. Because seriously, I don’t know if he’d be willing to take you back, and I can’t fuck with him on that. I’m not the real money here, Ken, you know that.”

“Yeah, you’re a parasite.”

“Oh, fuck you, you fucking terrorist,” Stewy says.

“Dude, you called _yourself_ a parasite, to my face. A parasite on a parasite.”

“That was before you fucked me out behind the woodshed.”

Stewy passionately saying ‘you fucked me’ makes Kendall’s ears and gut tingle. “Yeah, well, you lied to me about Sandy,” he says.

“‘ _You lied to me about Sandy,_ ’” Stewy mocks him. “You shot me and left me to die in the desert!”

“So we both have shit to apologize for,” Kendall says, smiling.

“Oh, you’re very funny. You’re hilarious. I’m pissing myself laughing, right now.”

Out of habit, Kendall reaches for his phone, then realizes he has no phones. Jess has all of his phones. He’s here in Stewy’s 24th floor apartment without any way to reach the outside world. He hiccups out a laugh in response to this.

“What?” Stewy says.

“I have no phone,” Kendall says. “I just realized I’m like, trapped in your apartment, cut off…”

“Bro, you can use my phone if you need to,” Stewy says, looking baffled. “I’m not gonna _9½ Weeks_ you.”

Kendall thinks of all the people who must be frantic to get in touch with him right now: Roman, Shiv, Karolina, Gerri, Frank, Rava, Naomi. Probably even Greg, who he accidentally left behind in the wolf den.

Not his dad, though. His dad won’t try to call. He knows what this was, he knows the genie can’t go back in the bottle.

Kendall wonders if Logan’s been able to put his anger aside long enough to feel pride, yet.

“I can’t think about this,” he says aloud.

Stewy’s eyebrows fly up. “You can’t think about this?”

“Not right now, it’s just… it’s too big. It’s like thinking about infinity, or something.” Kendall inhales. “Do you have any weed?”

Stewy leans down and pulls open a drawer in the table, pulls out a vape, and tosses it to Kendall. Kendall takes a grateful hit of liquefied THC.

“To be clear,” Kendall says, coughing, “I don’t want to see or talk to Sandy tonight. I’m not, um, in the right mindset. This is good, though, for you… for you guys. No matter what happens with me, this is good for you, so, just, uh, keep that at the fore.”

Stewy stares at him, then demands, “Why are you talking to me like you’re about to blow your brains out?”

“I’m not,” Kendall says. “I’m not. I just might take myself out of the equation for a while. Like, go off the grid.”

“You’re thinking you’re just going to _‘go off the grid’_ now?”

Kendall hits the vape again. “Yeah.”

Stewy puts his palms together and points them at Kendall. “Ken, I don’t — I don’t understand. We had everything set up. We had the whole thing ready to go. You were game. You were in. And then you blew it up. And now you blow _that_ up. What’s going on?”

Acrid weed smoke curdles in Kendall’s lungs, wracking him with hacking coughs and making him gag for air. Stewy comes over to him, taking the vape from him like he’s confiscating it.

“Something happened right after the bear hug,” Kendall chokes out when he can breathe again.

“No shit,” Stewy says, staring down at him with massive, liquid dark eyes. “So what was it?”

“I’m not gonna tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Listen, I’m — I’m just telling you something happened. I’m telling you there’s a reason I bailed. My dad… has something on me.”

“ _Has_ something on you? What, like something he’d use?”

Kendall shakes his head. “Not something he’d use. Stewy…”

“Yeah?”

Kendall reaches up and wraps an arm around him, pulling him close, burying his face in the soft warmth of Stewy’s stomach. He tugs his shirt up, untucking it from Stewy’s chinos, then lifting it and pressing a kiss to the slim blade of soft, dark hair below his belly button.

“Ken,” Stewy says, “you’re not making me feel better about any of this.”

“I wanna suck your dick,” Kendall murmurs, fumbling with his belt.

Stewy’s hands wrap around his wrists hard and freeze him in his movements. Kendall lifts his gaze to Stewy’s face.

“Have you fucked me, bro?” Stewy says, his voice low. “Did you fuck me in some way? Is there something you set in motion to fuck me and Sandy, and you came over here to, like, distract me while that’s happening with honeypot shit?”

“No,” Kendall says. “No… I really came here because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I’m dead serious, I swear.”

Stewy releases him. “Okay.”

“Did you put cologne on for me?” Kendall says, licking his lips.

“No.”

“Really? You put on cologne to just sit around your house?”

“Fuck you, yes I do, actually.”

Kendall unzips Stewy’s fly and pulls his pants down around his knees, mouthing at Stewy’s dick in his boxer briefs. Stewy makes a soft sound. “Where’s your girlfriend?” he says, nuzzling his crotch and inhaling the salty, tangy smell of him.

“She dumped me,” Stewy says. “Because lately I’m, like, deeply emotionally invested in _work_ for the first time in my fucking life, and I stopped being fun, which was my main selling point.”

“Sorry,” Kendall says, pulling his underwear down nice and slow, like he’s unwrapping a Christmas present.

“There’s no way they aren’t destroying you right now,” Stewy says, even as he’s grabbing at Kendall’s shoulder to steady himself while Kendall laps inquisitively at his dick. “There’s no way your dad’s people aren’t out there right now telling everyone in the world that you’re a crazy, low-life drug addict —”

“That’s okay,” Kendall says to Stewy’s penis. “The documents speak for themselves.”

“What documents? The shit you had your cousin passing out?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d he get those?”

“He stole them when Tom had him destroying shit. He gave them to me ‘cause he didn’t trust Dad to keep him in the lifestyle he’d become accustomed to. Our circular firing squad spooked him.”

Stewy laughs at this. Kendall manhandles him, then, dragging him down onto the couch and rolling him onto his back, then sliding off the couch and kneeling on the hardwood floor, staring up at him. Stewy stares back, his lips parted and his eyes large.

“I’m gonna suck you,” Kendall says, “and then I’m gonna fuck you. And if you say ‘Sandy’ to me one more time tonight, I’m gonna kill you.”

“Sandy,” Stewy says, grinning at him.

“You stupid, stupid asshole.”

Kendall, who would love to be thinking about nothing else in the world besides the dick in his mouth, starts sucking Stewy off. Saliva gushes forth and makes his tongue glide easily over Stewy’s tip.

Stewy groans and grabs at the edge of the couch, his pinky ring glittering in Kendall’s peripheral vision. Kendall adjusts his pose on the floor, raising himself a little and sprawling over Stewy’s lap, balling his shirt in a fist and closing that fist hard.

Kendall gives him a very thorough blowjob: massaging his balls, licking the fluttering vein in his shaft, tonguing the slit in his tip, taking him as deep as he can manage (which is not very deep). It’s the best he can offer Stewy, at this point, and it says a lot more than a bunch of empty words would. ‘Look, I will debase myself for nothing more than your mindless pleasure.’

Despite all his earlier protests, Stewy does not look the gift blowjob in the mouth. He sinks into the couch, whining and moaning, whimpering and groaning, grabbing at Kendall’s short hair and failing to get a handful of it, then grabbing at the shoulders of Kendall’s shirt instead.

He starts to piston his hips, fucking Kendall’s mouth, and Kendall resists the gag that tickles the back of his throat. He’s quick to nausea these days, but he leans into it, riding the razor’s edge of it, letting his discomfort amplify his pleasure like those nutcases who cut cocaine into their skin.

Stewy’s hands are all over his neck and head, grabbing at him, stroking him when Stewy says, “I’m gonna come.”

Kendall intentionally, self-abusively takes Stewy deep again then, so deep he thinks he might vomit from it. When Stewy comes, it’s a bitter gunshot to the back of his throat. He starts gagging and coughing like he did earlier from the weed, sitting back on his heels and choking into his sleeve.

Stewy leans forward, looking mussed and happy but concerned. Kendall leans forward to meet him, kissing him on the mouth so he can taste himself. Then he presses their foreheads together.

“I am going to fuck you,” he mutters, “until you stop talking. Until you _can’t_ talk.”

“Good luck,” Stewy says, smiling.

/

Kendall likes to move from place to place while fucking someone, because it maximizes the pleasure of variety while minimizing any time spent alone with his thoughts.

First he fucks Stewy over the bathroom sink, because that’s where they had to go to get the lube, and they’re lazy. Then he drags him into the bedroom, shoves Stewy facedown over the edge of his own bed, and fucks the daylights out of him there, too. By the time he has him in missionary on the bed proper, Stewy’s eyes are rolling back in his head, and he’s panting and whimpering and covered in a sheen of sweat.

Kendall keeps telling him to shut up every time he makes a noise, kissing him into silence, pinching him on the ass when he’s particularly loud. He finds Stewy’s noises hot, but it’s the principle of the thing. Ever since the accident, the one thing he’s wanted from Stewy is for him to please just _shut the fuck up_ , but the more Kendall has stonewalled Stewy, the louder he’s gotten. The more Kendall shut him out, the harder Stewy tried to scale his walls: issuing nastier and nastier press releases, going on trips with their mutual friends and posting wildly about it on social media, talking to Rava behind his back, confronting him in public at Argestes like the spurned lover that he is.

Of course, Stewy’s gambit worked. Is Kendall not here? Is Kendall not currently balls deep in Stewy? Did Kendall not kill his dad on live TV? Stewy knew exactly how and where to apply the pressure. He didn’t provide the final straw, the one unassailable turn of the weather vane that caused Kendall to break from Logan and slit his throat, but he provided enough. Greece itself was a big-ass straw. Stewy’s abject refusal to take his board seat was a big-ass straw. The disbelief on his face, the look of ‘Why am I, your best friend-cum-worst enemy, more worried about your ultimate fate than you are?’ was something Kendall couldn’t ignore any more than he could ignore Naomi’s distillation of forty years of dysfunction into one awful sentence.

Kendall feels that he’s about to come and fists his hands in the sheets on either side of Stewy’s shoulders, staring into his face as he continues to thrust into him. Stewy stares back at him, looking hungry and curious.

He wants answers. Kendall can’t blow him off forever. At some point, he will have to either kill himself, or start to confess things to his loved ones — not at a press conference, but one-to-one, within the sacred shroud of privacy.

“Hey,” Kendall says, the sound coming from low in his gut.

“Hey,” Stewy says back, sounding breathy.

“I’m gonna come.”

“Do it.”

Kendall leans down and presses their foreheads together again. Stewy seeks his lips out, kissing him and nudging his nose against Kendall’s. Their hips move in unison on Kendall’s last few thrusts, and then Kendall comes in a spasm of pleasure. He exhales and lays down on Stewy’s warm body. Their chests rise and fall together.

“Good?” Kendall says.

“Yeah,” Stewy says.

Kendall nods and starts to play with Stewy’s chest hair. His mind is blank; it’s blissful. Reality has fuzzed at the edges. The infernal grinding of his brain has quieted for a moment.

Stewy is holding him, has encircled his arms around him. Kendall pretends not to notice this.

“I don’t know where to go or what to do,” he mumbles.

“I wouldn’t know either,” Stewy says. “You’re kind of super fucked.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, if you wanted to get lied to, you wouldn’t have come here.”

This is true.

Kendall pulls out of Stewy, making him wince, and rolls off of him, lying beside him in the hot, messy sheets. They breathe there for a while. The whole room stinks of sex.

“Starting to think the reason you _did_ come over here was to shoot a load,” Stewy says.

“I have two hands, I could have done that anywhere. Plus, I sucked you off.”

“You did suck me off,” Stewy muses. “You were on me awfully fast, though, dude.”

“Sorry. It’s the adrenaline.”

Stewy’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Sandy knows we fuck sometimes, by the way.”

Kendall’s heart drops into his gut. “Oh, Jesus Christ, are you serious?”

“Relax, I’m just saying, in case it comes up now.” He pauses. “Now that we’re in sideways world.”

“You _told_ him that?”

“He barely even looked surprised,” Stewy says, laughing. “Fucking dinosaur. Maybe he thought he misheard me. Actually, no, he didn’t, because when we were rounding up dirt on you, he asked me if I knew of any other guys you had fucked.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told him not to go there.”

“Thanks.”

“I was protecting myself, to be clear,” Stewy says.

“Still, thanks. I mean, not that there’s anything there, anyway.” (Not completely true — he’s gotten head from a few guys besides Stewy, but he doesn’t think that counts). Kendall’s quiet for a moment. “Do _you_ fuck other guys?”

“What are you, my boyfriend?”

“I’m just curious. Since we’re saying true things.”

“Once in a while,” Stewy says.

“Did your girlfriend not think that was cheating?”

“I hope not,” Stewy says, “considering she used to bring other women over and bang them in our shower.”

Kendall grins. “You never told me about that, you dirty dog.”

“You never asked, asshole.” Stewy clears his throat and sits up a little, looking over at Kendall. “You didn’t have any concerns about me cheating on her when it was you I was fucking.”

“Well, that’s different,” Kendall says. “That’s me.”

“Oh, of course.”

“We can’t cheat on people with each other. We’ve known each other for thirty years and been fucking for twenty. That’s like saying _masturbating_ is cheating.”

“You have been rationalizing wildly about every topic known to man ever since you got here,” Stewy says. “Kind of entertaining to just listen to it.”

“Fuck you,” Kendall says.

Stewy smiles at him.

“Do you have any of the good stuff?” Kendall says.

“I have coke,” Stewy affirms.

“Do you have Xans?”

“Yeah.”

“I might need some Xans to sleep.”

“Oh, you’re sleeping here, are you?”

Kendall nods slowly, holding Stewy’s dark gaze. “It’s a sleepover,” he says, dead serious.

/

Kendall remembers Stewy has a pretty good rainfall shower, so he takes up residence in there for about forty-five minutes, letting hot water pound over him while he stares at the wall in catatonia. Whenever his mind wanders from blank nothing, he forces himself to focus on the thought of Stewy’s hot girlfriend banging other, equally hot women in here, and that gives him relief from peering into the yawning chasm in his brain.

When his skin is bright red and starts to itch from how hot it is, he gets out. Stewy left him towels and a bath sheet, along with a pair of lounge pants, and an old Harvard shirt and sweatshirt. Kendall dries off and puts these on appreciatively. He forgot he came over here in a suit.

When he starts down the hallway, he hears Stewy before he sees him.

“Yeah, we’re continuing to look at all of our options,” Stewy’s saying. He sounds like he’s on the phone. “Obviously the Roys are a mess. Anyone can see that. That’s my thing, is like, if they can’t handle the stress of a takeover attempt, if it’s _this_ catastrophic to their ability to lead the company —“

He’s quiet for a moment, as if the other person is talking. Kendall rounds the corner and sees him sitting at the table in his dining alcove, papers spread out in front of him, his phone nestled between his ear and shoulder. Kendall comes up behind him and puts his hands over Stewy’s eyes, then leans in and blows in his ear.

Stewy shivers, but doesn’t make a sound. “Exactly,” he says into the phone. “I mean, I just don’t know. We’ll see. But Sandy and I are very confident about what this means for us. This has been scary as shit to shareholders, and we want to assuage that fear. In the right hands, Waystar can get back on track.”

Kendall catches fragments of what the other person is saying, but nothing stands out, and he doesn’t immediately recognize the voice.

“Yeah, we’ll keep in touch, absolutely,” Stewy says. “Have a good weekend.” He hangs up.

“Vulture,” Kendall says, kissing his neck.

“Fuck you, at this point I’m saving the company. You’re lucky you pulled this stunt on a Saturday and there’s some time for damage control before the markets open. If this had hit your stock right away, you’d be trading at fucking — there isn’t even a number low enough. You’d be giving out shares for acorns. You’d be paying people to take the stock off your hands.”

Kendall kisses him some more. “Look, I don’t care what you do,” he says. “I don’t care who you call. I did my part, I’m done.”

“You picked a funny time to stop caring about all this,” Stewy says. “By the way, your brother’s been calling me non-stop.”

“Roman?”

“Of course Roman.”

Kendall’s quiet for a moment. “Have you picked up?”

“No. I keep hanging up on him, and he keeps texting me like, ‘Fuck you, Stewbag, I know you know where he is.’”

Kendall starts massaging Stewy’s shoulders, sniffing his mingled smell of cologne, sweat and sex. “He doesn’t know anything, he’s just assuming.”

“You betrayed your whole family, dude,” Stewy says. “That’s twice now.”

“No, I betrayed my dad.”

“You know it’s the same thing.”

“They’ll realize,” Kendall says in a quiet voice. “Once they’ve had some time with it… they’ll realize it had to be done. There was no other way.”

Stewy tilts his head back, looking up at him, searching his face. “There was another way. You could have laid down and let the bus hit you.”

“Yeah.” Kendall claps him on the shoulders. “And I didn’t. Hey, are you hungry? I’m hungry. Let’s order some food.”

“Finally you’re speaking my language.”

/

Kendall wakes up the next morning Xanax-groggy with a pounding headache, tangled in Stewy’s sheets and limbs, sweating in the temperature-controlled air of his bedroom. Stewy likes to keep the thermostat high. He’s puzzled for a moment about what woke him, because Stewy is still knocked out beside him, sleeping the sleep of the dead, but then a voice calls through the door: “Mr. Hosseini? We’re here to clean?”

“Hey,” Kendall says, shoving Stewy awake, “your maids are here.”

“Oh shit,” Stewy says, breathless with confusion, bolting up in bed. He rubs his eyes. “Uhh. Fuck. One second,” he calls, then shoots a groggy look at Kendall. “I can’t believe you’re still in my apartment. This is blowing my whole weekend to shit.”

Kendall’s mouth is very dry; he grabs a water bottle off the bedside table and starts chugging from it. When he’s done, he says, “So sorry that me killing my dad got in the way of you doing lines at 1OAK.”

“1OAK? Am I twenty-two?”

“Whatever you do these days. I don’t know.”

“My weekend would have been fucked by that press conference even if you didn’t come over,” Stewy mutters, scrubbing his hand over his face and then rubbing the meat of his palm against one of his eyes. “Are you open to talking to Sandy yet?”

“No,” Kendall says, tossing the sheets off himself and getting out of bed. “And don’t ask me again, or I’ll have a press conference about how I fuck you in the ass while you moan like a porn star. I’ll take all the Stewy dick pics I have and leak them to the _Daily_.”

Stewy squints at him, looking half-sleepy, half-concerned. “You _are_ just screwing with me, right?” he says. “You haven’t completely lost your mind, to be clear?”

“Fuck around and find out,” Kendall says, and with that, he walks away to take a leak.

/

Stewy insists on watching CNBC all morning, and Kendall can’t escape the sound of it no matter where he goes in the apartment (except for the master bathroom, where his presence seems to disturb the maids at work) so he ends up filching a Bluetooth-enabled sleep mask/headphones combo of Stewy’s and lying on the couch with it over his eyes while it blasts DMX in his ears. Where the hood, where the hood, where the hood at.

He’s so deep in his DMX coma that when Stewy starts shaking his arm and slapping him, it takes him several long moments to rouse from it. Finally Kendall pulls the whole apparatus off his head, blinking at Stewy, who looks anxious.

“Your brother,” he says, “is in my lobby.”

“Which one?”

“Why do you keep asking which one? You know which one.”

“Roman’s downstairs?”

“Yes.”

Kendall considers this. “Can you send him up?” he says.

“Send him _up?_ Why?”

“So I can talk to him.”

“Dude,” Stewy says in disbelief.

“Trust me, it’ll be worse if I send him away. Just give me a few minutes with him.”

“He is going to walk in here and start peeing on all my furniture,” Stewy says.

“He is not,” Kendall says. Roman, in a fit of middle-school anger at being left out of Stewy and Kendall’s fun, had once stolen Stewy’s backpack and peed on it. This incident seems to have left an indelible impression on him. “I’ll keep him calm. Just send him up.”

Kendall’s voice is even, but when Stewy leaves him and goes over to the elevator doors to press the call button, his heart starts to pound and his palms grow slick with sweat. Derealization sets in, and his brain pulls back from his body like a dolly zoom. Reality loses its potency. He’s a doll man in a dollhouse, now.

He swings his legs off the couch and gets up, walking over to where Stewy is waiting in front of the elevator but stopping a few feet away from him. This first encounter with Roman will be all about optics, and Kendall doesn’t want to be seen standing shoulder to shoulder with Stewy.

The elevator dings, then the doors slide open. Roman jerks his head up as they do, looking absolutely crazed with annoyance, his eyes bloodshot.

“Okay, so you’re okay?” he says to Kendall.

“Yeah, I’m fine —”

“Then what the _fuck_ ,” he interrupts, charging him and trying to put him in a headlock immediately. Kendall grapples with him, subduing him.

“Stop,” Stewy says, looking incredulous. (Stewy is an only child). “Don’t do this shit in my apartment. I didn’t even want you here, anyway, Christ.”

“Oh, yeah?” Roman mocks him in a goofy voice while continuing to scuffle with Kendall, who is holding him at bay without much effort. “I can’t come up to the treehouse, Stewy? Fuck you. What’s going on here?” He catches Kendall by surprise and shoves him away, sending him staggering; Kendall has to grab onto a pillar to stop himself from falling on his ass. “Oh, okay, I get it. Nice hickey,” he says to Stewy. “You brother-fucking snake.”

Kendall’s gut swoops; Stewy appears to take massive pains to not react to this. “Why are you in my home, Ro-Ro?” he says impassively. “I would offer you something to drink, but the thing is, I don’t want you to think you should linger.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Roman spits. “I don’t want your butt-boy mineral water. Ken, why are you here? What the fuck are you _doing?”_

“I did what I had to do,” Kendall says, talking as slowly as he can, “and I’m at the only place I thought I probably wouldn’t be bothered.”

“So much for that,” Stewy says, folding his arms.

Roman makes a face at him, then turns back to Kendall. He keeps trying to meet Kendall’s eyes, but Kendall dodges him at every turn. “So you’re back with them, now? Sandy and Stewy? Was all the other shit you did even real, or were you just collecting dirt on Dad the entire time? What, are you a fucking double agent?” He appears to pause and consider the ramifications of this, then says, “Even during boar on the floor, you were a double agent?”

“It’s not like that,” Kendall says. “It’s not, I swear. It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like!” Roman shouts. “Why did you _do_ that? I just spent ten hours on a plane, then got on two helicopters, then rode all the way uptown, and I want answers. I didn’t come here for bullshit.”

“I don’t know how many answers I have for you,” Kendall says, finally making eye contact with him. Roman doesn’t even actually look angry, he just looks hurt.

“Fuck you,” Roman says. “That is… worthless. _You’re_ worthless.”

“It’s the best thing, in the end,” Kendall says.

“What, for you to hand the family business over to Sandy and Stewy?”

“That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I did.”

“You did, you just handed him the company!” Roman explodes, with a broad gesture in the direction of Stewy.

“Yeah, after fucking tanking it,” Stewy says, laughing in disbelief. “I mean, are you kidding, bro? The stock could go into a death spiral on Monday morning, you could be bankrupt with a portfolio full of toxic assets by close, in which case literally none of this matters.”

“No, fuck you, we’re solid,” Roman says. “Most of the company is solid. We’re too big to fail overnight.”

“Oh, is that your professional diagnosis, Treasury Secretary Roman?”

“Fuck off.”

“You’re already leveraged out the ass. Stock price falls, you borrow more, your financiers already know you can’t pay a single dime of it back —”

“Then why do you want to buy Waystar if it’s such a lemon, snakeman?” Roman demands.

Stewy puts his hands on his thighs, bending slightly so he’s eye-level with Roman. “I _didn’t_ ,” he snaps. “Your fucking brother bailed on our deal and left me holding the bag, and I had to keep going. _I never wanted to buy your shitty fucking company by myself.”_

This lands heavily, and they all just stand there, bobbing in the wake of it like 20-foot sailboats during high tide.

“So you two weren’t working together on this,” Roman says, glancing between them.

Kendall shakes his head.

“All Ken has done is fuck me over,” Stewy says. “We haven’t worked together since before your sister’s wedding. I have no idea what’s going on with him, and he won’t tell me, either.”

“Then why is he in your apartment?”

“I genuinely don’t know,” Stewy says, looking over at Kendall.

Kendall, oppressed by the glaring eyeballs of his brothers (both emotional and biological) and the claustrophobia of being 24 floors in the air over Manhattan, takes a shuddering breath. “Where is Dad?” he says to Roman. “How is Dad?”

“Fuck you,” Roman says, again. He seems to be working with a limited vocabulary today. “You don’t get to know.”

“But seriously, how is he?”

“He’s not dead,” Roman says. “He hasn’t had brain explosion part two yet.” He pauses. “Do you even know what you did? You fucked all of us. For one, you and Greg fucked Tom, like, super hard — as in, federal prison hard. You might have fucked yourself. We haven’t even been able to figure out the scope of the damage yet.”

“It had to be done,” Kendall says. His mouth is dry again. His own voice rings in his ears like it’s coming from someone else.

“It did?” Roman says. “Says who?”

“Our souls were rotting, Rome.”

“Our _souls_? What the fuck are you talking about, are you high? Are you shrooming?”

“Not unless he was already shrooming when he got here,” Stewy puts in.

Roman shoots Stewy a glance, then turns back to Kendall. “Okay,” he says, putting his hands up. “I can’t… I have to get out of here. You’re doing your fucking corpse thing again, and I can’t — I have no patience for that shit. I just want you to know this is, like, the worst thing you’ve ever done, and we’re all fucked, now. You just set our house on fire with all of us still in it, and you’re acting like that’s normal.”

“You’ll realize,” Kendall murmurs. “In due time. You’ll get it.”

“No, I will not,” Roman says with confidence. “You’re a crazy person, you need to go to the hospital, and that’s why you’re here with _this_ fucker, who does nothing but enable you and suck your dick.”

“I don’t enable him,” Stewy says.

Roman turns on his heel and heads back over to the elevator, stabbing the call button with his finger over and over again, shaking his head. “You can have each other,” he says. “Lunatics.”

“You’ll realize,” Kendall calls after him.

As the elevator doors open, Roman turns and gives him double-barrelled middle fingers, then walks backwards into it. “Nope!” he says. “Oh, and by the way, Ken — you're fired. You are so fired it’s not even funny.”

The doors shut, and they hear the elevator descend. After a beat, Stewy turns to Kendall. “He made some good points,” he says.

Kendall inhales. “I think I’m ready to watch the news now,” he says.

/

Stewy makes a pot of coffee, and Kendall and Stewy sit beside each other on the couch, their sock feet up on the table, watching the news on his 219-inch TV. Stewy keeps changing the channel, and on every single one (even ATN) what Kendall did is a top-ten story, if not the lead story of the hour.

“This was out-and-out patricide,” one pundit says. “This was violent. This was a chilling, premeditated strike… who knows how long this was in the works?”

Kendall knows how long it was in the works: about ten hours, all told. Maybe even less, because he didn’t have a concrete plan until Greg spilled to him about the documents on their flight back.

“They’re covering this like it’s 9/11,” he finally says.

Stewy sips his coffee. “Nothing else happened this weekend,” he says. “Also, this is such a good cable news story, which you should know, considering your whole thing is cable news. It’s insanely dramatic, they can theorize about it all day long, gossip without admitting that what they’re doing is gossiping.”

“Is this even that big a deal?” Kendall says. “To the average person, I mean?”

“Ken, are you kidding me? This is like if the Enron guys had held a press conference and out of nowhere went, ‘Hey, funny story, you know how you’re all starting to suspect our financials are fucked? Yeah, our financials are fucked. Have a good Saturday.’”

Kendall lets out a genuine laugh for what might be the first time in days. “Look,” he says, “it was all gonna come out anyway. I just fell on the sword.”

“Don’t get cute,” Stewy says. “You pushed your dad on the sword, and your entire family is gonna follow him onto the sword, because you’re the first person who ever figured out how to tell him no.”

“Stewy, are you developing a conscience for the first time in your life?”

“No,” Stewy says. “It’s just like I’ve spent months trying to break into a building, and then someone set the building on fire.”

Kendall’s eyes are starting to burn from staring at the massive TV, with its larger-than-life talking heads filling every inch of his vision. Things feel even less real now than they did earlier, which he knew would happen as soon as he started watching news coverage.

“I would like to talk to my kids,” he says.

Stewy nods. “You want a phone?”

“Yeah. Do you have Rava’s number? I don’t know it by heart.”

“I have it,” Stewy says, patting him on the thigh and getting up.

“Thanks,” Kendall says. He leans his head against the back of the couch and closes his eyes.


End file.
